


276 - Angst-turned-fluff/comedy, Door List Mistakes & Morphine

by storiesaboutvan



Category: Catfish and the Bottlemen (Band)
Genre: F/M, Reader-Insert
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-19
Updated: 2018-05-19
Packaged: 2019-05-08 22:49:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14704071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/storiesaboutvan/pseuds/storiesaboutvan
Summary: Filling the prompt for an angst-turned-comedy/fluff fic for harryanddrawing including a door list mistake, badly timed alcohol, accidental bleeding, hospital rooms, and good ol’ morphine.Mini request for a clumsy Reader.





	276 - Angst-turned-fluff/comedy, Door List Mistakes & Morphine

You watched her bright green eyes scan the list for the second time. Surely, they were contact lenses. The girl clicked her tongue and looked back up at you. With a shrug, she repeated what she had already told you. “Not there." 

The security guard standing in front of the artist entrance back door looked from Green Eyes to you. He was silently asking her if she wanted you moved on. You could tell by the expression on his face; it wasn’t exactly kind. 

You didn’t want to have to play the girlfriend card, but there was nothing else to do. None of the guys were answering your calls. Although you knew you couldn’t blame them for that, so close to showtime, you were still pissed. Holding up your phone to show a photo of you and Van, you said, "I’m his girlfriend. Been together for a while now. Here, look… See? The photo was taken just the other day.”

Green Eyes weighed up the options. It was probably better to check if you were legitimate. If you weren’t, she’d be called naïve and a sucker. If you were, then good. Locking out the lead singer’s girlfriend would result in worse than being called patronising names. “Gimme a sec,” she said, disappearing inside. Two minutes later she popped her head out and beckoned for you to come.

Without smiling, you passed the security guard and tried to look important and tough. When you tripped on the last step up, you caught yourself before you fell. “Easy, Miss,” the guard said smugly

Inside, you followed Green Eyes down the hallway. “Thought I might catch ‘em before they went on, but no luck. They’re playing now. You’re all mates with the opening act though, yeah? Their drummer vouched for you. Also, you don’t seem like a liar. Or a crazy fan,” she told you.

“Really not a fuckin’ fan right now,” you mumbled under your breath. You objected to the phrase 'crazy fan’ entirely, but figured it was one of those 'pick your battles’ moments.

“Did you want me to take you to where everyone is, or?”

“No. Just… Ah, Catfish got a green room or something?” you asked.

Nodding, she took you to a room that was so obviously meant for the boys. There was a television set up, paused on a game of Fifa. All their favourite drinks and snacks were on a table, the alcohol going untouched until later. A small clothes rack was mostly unused. Only Van’s velvet jacket was there. Everyone else just had their clothes spewing out of bags all over the place.

“Want me to go tell someone you’re here? Like, I know they’re on stage but maybe a manager or roadie or something..” Green Eyes asked, confused at why you’d want to be alone and doing her best to make up for the initial cold shoulder.

In return, you tried your best not to take your bad mood out on her. You replied, “No, thanks. I’ll just wait. Thank you.”

She nodded and left, closing the door with a soft thud behind her. For the first time in what seemed like hours, you breathed out. It was deep and shaky and unsettling. Walking to the table of food, you tried to shake out the negativity of the day. It had been a bad one. Real bad. The perfectly fucked Friday for a perfectly fucked week. This was meant to be the saving grace. You’d not seen Van in a couple of weeks. He’d been on tour, but finally playing the hometown, you’d see him again. Alas, on the guest list you were not. Did he forget? Had he delegated the role, and they forgot? Did it even matter?

There was a new bottle of Tito’s on the table. Benji wouldn’t mind if you opened it first, savouring the crack of the freshly opened bottle. The first shot, poured into a plastic cup, went down too easy. Reminding yourself of pacing, you poured another, but added ice, soda, then looked around for lime. Sitting in a bowl of fruit (literally only bananas), were fresh lemons and limes.

“Jesus… real rockstars now,” you said to yourself.

Someone had thought of providing real citrus, yet lacked the foresight to set out knives. You looked around for anything else you could use. Short of smashing a bottle for the shards of glass, you were stuck. Then, out of nowhere, something reminded you of the weirdness of Bondy. His bag was in the corner of the room and you knew exactly where he kept his Swiss army knife. He’d shown you one time, “Just in case." 

Before long, your hands were covered in lime juice as you hacked your way through it. It was by no means a pretty wedge, but it did the job of adding zing to your really shitty attempt at a nice drink. You downed the second drink too quickly and went back to the task of mixing. Instead of gaining skill in the repeated action, your hands were more shaky when cutting the lime.

The blade of the Swiss army knife found resistance in the middle of the fruit. You held the lime firm in the palm of your hand, then pushed the knife in. It went straight past the middle and cut it into two very uneven parts. They both fell from your grip, leaving lime juice in their wake. You were already looking at the scene. You had watched it happened. You had watched the knife slip, cut, then get stuck. You had definitely seen it happen, yet as you looked at the knife sticking out of your hand, you felt disbelief.

The Swiss army knife was too heavy to stay stuck in your flesh if you moved your hand at all. From the tiny little sober part of your brain, a voice said, 'Leave the knife in. Hold it with your other hand. Get help.’ The voice went unheard and instead you just ripped the knife out. Apparently, it had gone in deeper than you had thought and blood shot out after it.

"Fuck,” you said too calmly as you watched blood flow from the hole in your palm. You wriggled your fingers. They all moved. The thumb, however, did not. The wound was below the thumb, in the muscle. “Um…” Looking around the room, there was plenty of material that you could use, but you were frozen in time and space. The blood had started to drip down your arm and onto the floor. Taking a step backwards to look at it, you forced the blood to spread. It was beginning to look like a crime scene and you were beginning to get dizzy.

“Y/N?”

Green Eyes was standing at the door. You hadn’t heard her knock or come in. Snapping out of her shock, she ran to you and grabbed a stack of the paper napkins on the table. She held them hard on your hand. You watched her spin her head from side to side as she looked for something in the room. “Hold,” she ordered, as she put your healthy hand on top of the napkins. The first aid kit was under the table. Moving the napkins, she covered your hand in the cleaning fluid then winced. “God, that’s fuckin’ bad. You’ve lost…” A pause to look at the red. “…a lot of blood. How are you feeling?”

Trying to focus your vision on her, you swayed on the spot. “M'fine,” you replied.

“Yeah, no. Sit.”

You could do that; you let your legs collapse and you went crashing to the ground. The blood on the floor began to soak into your clothes and onto your exposed skin.

“Fuck! I can’t- I don’t- I’m just gonna call an ambulance,” she said, but you didn’t hear her. The girl with the bright green eyes held your hand while she waited for help. She kept talking to you. She told you that she had come in to apologise for being so cold before and for not believing you. She asked you how you got drunk so quick. A valid point. You’d only had two.

When the paramedics arrived, they said they saw it all the time. A combination of exhaustion, a little alcohol, lack of food and water, and loss of blood. They told Green Eyes that you’d be fine, but she worried about herself since she was the one that had to tell Van what had happened and why his girlfriend’s blood was all over the green room.

…

As he came off stage, Van didn’t notice the girl awkwardly lingering at the edge of all his interactions. The band made their way backstage, heading in the direction of the green room. Of course, she had cleaned up. She’d never been very good at that though. Van stood in the middle of the room and looked around, trying to work out why he felt weird. Something was out of place.

“Who’s been fuckin’ with me shit?” Bondy asked, picking his Swiss army knife up off the table. Van watched as Bondy tried to do some super cool flicking thing with it, but it just dropped to the floor, heavy and cold. The floor was sticky, Van noticed then. Badly mopped in the time they were on stage.

“Hey!” Benji squeaked. “Who opened the Tito’s without me?”

“Goldilocks?” Bob offered, seeing the opportunity and taking it while taking a banana from the fruit bowl. The table was different too.

“Goldilocks is off the rails,” Bondy said to Bob.

“Wait. Where’s Y/N?” Van asked nobody in particular. Everyone listened though. Van moved to dig through his bag for his phone. Missed calls and angry messages. “You was on the door, yeah?” Van stood up and walked towards Green Eyes, still lingering in the doorway. Next to her was the bin, so open for all to see. It was filled with the carnage. “Where’s Y/N? What's… What the fuck’s happened?”

…

“Canne ansa tha’?” you asked the nurse wrapping your hand.

“Best not, love. You’re a little up in the clouds right now. Morphine and all that, yeah?”

“Yeah,” you repeated, then proceeded to pick up Van’s phone call anyway. You weren’t being defiant. It was just that you’d only processed the final word of her statement. “Ah, 'ello?”

“Baby?!” Van’s voice was frantic. Panicked. You’d never heard him like that before. “Baby, are you okay? Which hospital did they take you do? Are you okay? You fucked anything up permanently or anything?”

“Ah, Van? That you?”

“Course it’s fuckin’ me. Jesus. What happened?”

And with that, you were too high in the clouds to continue the conversation. You dropped your phone and watched it slide down your chest and onto the hospital bed’s plastic mattress. With your clumsy luck, it was amazing it didn’t clatter to the ground.

“Want me to tell him goodbye for ya, love?” the nurse asked. She’d finished with the bandage. You just looked at her, a stupid grin on your face. “Right you are, love.” She sighed, picked up the phone and spoke. “This is Debbie, who am I speaking to?”

Your attention moved to the rest of the room. Moved from the emergency waiting room after too long sitting alone, holding your hand tight, you were in one of the general emergency treatment spaces. It was packed with beds, all occupied by people in pain and distress. It wasn’t a pleasant place to be, but the morphine was letting you see the world through rose-tinted glasses. Debbie waved her hand in front of your face and made you watched as she put your phone in the top drawer of the cabinet next to the bed.

“That thing’s your responsibility,” she told you in a stern voice.

“He ain’t a thing!” you squeaked. “He a boy!”

“No, love. Not the lad on the phone. The phone. Keep an eye on it. If it gets knicked, that’s your problem. Alright? Your lad will be here shortly at any rate. Just sit tight till then, okay?” Debbie said. She waited for you to acknowledge all that she had told you, but she just got a vacant stare when your gaze randomly landed back on her. “Righteo,” she said to herself under her breath as she walked away, leaving you to your own devices.

Time meant nothing to you; any measurement of it was void. You spent the space between Debbie leaving your side and Van arriving floating, watching, looking at your fingertips and wondering why the prints were so goddamn swirly. When Van came into vision, he did so slowly. For a while, he was just a blur of black, moving frantically from one side of your bed to the other, holding your face and talking to you. Then, shapes and sounds, taking a seat than standing up and back again and again. Finally, there he was, sitting in a plastic chair next to the bed, watching you for any signs of lucidity.

“Hey,” you said to him eventually.

“Baby? You here?” He pulled his chair closer to reached out to fold loose strands of hair behind your ear. While you were spacing out, he’d asked Debbie for a wet cloth. Gently, he had cleaned the blood from your face and arm. Every touch he’d made since he’d arrived at the hospital had been one of great care. It had not gone unnoticed by the nurses, who were swooning over the very handsome rockstar boy.

“Where else would'a be? Oh! Maybe locked ou’ 'cause I ain’t on tha liss,” you replied in a slurred and spiteful way.

Van didn’t flinch. Usually, he was easy to pick a fight with, but Van would never fight such a small and hurt thing. Lying in the hospital bed, bandaged hand and tired eyes, you were defenceless, even if you didn’t feel it.

“I don’t know how that happened, baby. I swear. The door list just rolls over from venue to venue. I’m sorry. I really am. But that’s just a little thing, yeah? Don’t really matter now, you know what I mean?”

“No! I don’t! You forgot me,” you whispered. Hearing yourself verbalising the fear deep inside was more brutal than you’d anticipated. Actually, you’d not really anticipated any reaction to your own words. But, there it was. You started to cry. Van stood up and tried to bring you closer to him, to hold you. Crossing your arms across your chest, you frowned the saddest of frowns and sniffled.

At the nurses’ desk, Debbie sighed as she watched you cry. She walked over and gently pat Van on the back. “She got here dry-eyed and all. Had her hand stabbed, cleaned, stitched, and still didn’t shed a tear. Been a tough cookie the whole time. You get 'ere and she’s in bloody tears. What have you gone and done to her now?”

“He forgot me,” you said, pouting.

“Well, he’s here, love. Doesn’t look like he’s forgotten you to me. Looks like he’s lost without ya.” She quickly shut down your moment. “She has to sign the release forms, but the morphine’s still a little too in effect. Gonna have to wait it out a little longer,” Debbie directed to Van.

“Yeah, why is she so fuckin’ doped up?” Van asked, grinning a little. At some point, all this would be funny. It would all be a story to tell his future children and current friends.

“Aye, it is a lot. Doc thought it was just a regular little stab-” Debbie started.

“Little stab?” Van repeated, shocked.

“Yeah. But then her thumb weren’t working, so they had to dig around to make sure she’d not cut through all the muscle. They dish out the meds good when they go digging. Not exactly a nice sensation. She’s alright though. All stitched up. No permanent damage. I explained all this to her before, but…” Debbie and Van looked over at you. You were leaning behind Van to try to get his phone from his back pocket. He kept pushing your arms away like you were a child. “Ah, not sure how much she’s retained, if you get my drift. She seems tough. Well… Physically tough,”

“Has to be. She’s always fallin’ over and bumpin’ into things. Would be funny if she didn’t bruise so bad. Says she doesn’t even notice sometimes,”

“Sounds about right. I was glad to see you 'ere so quick. Kept fallin’ out bed somehow,” Debbie said, laughing. “Well, I’ll bring yas some tea and give ya another hour, then we’ll see how she’s doing. Alright, love?”

You rolled your head on the pillow to look at her. Van held in a snort.

Sitting back down in the plastic chair, Van handed you his phone. “You wanted this?”

Without explaining yourself, you looked at his lockscreen. Like it had been before he left for tour, it was a photo of you he took. His passcode was the same - your birthday. His background hadn’t changed either. Another photo of you. Looking up at Van, you chewed your lip. “You didn’t forget me,” you said. It wasn’t a question, but he answered with nod anyway. “I’ve had a real bad week,”

“I know, baby. You told me that on the phone. I’m sorry. Kinda your luck, innit? Bad week. Get locked out. Stab yourself with Bondy’s knife… How did you stab yourself?”

“Makin’ drinks,” you answered, too tired to say much more. Letting Van’s phone out of your unwounded hand, Van caught it before it hit the floor. “Van?” The way you said it, the way his name sounded rolling out of your mouth, made him smile. All of a sudden, you sat up and leaned out of bed in an attempt to hug him. Distance and depth wildly misjudged, you almost fell. Van was used to your clumsiness and had adapted fast reflexes. He held you in his arms and let you melt into him. “You didn’t forget me,” you said again.

“I couldn’t fuckin’ forget you if I tried, baby,” he replied.

Van moved you to be lying back on the bed. He leaned over and rested an elbow on each side of you, letting his hands hold your face gently. While pressing a kiss to your forehead, Van ran his thumbs over your cheeks. When he went to move, you chirped out a little squeak of protest. Van grinned and returned to be close. He pet his hands along the sides of your face and back into your hair in tender, even strokes.

“I hate being away from you, Y/N. I know I talk a lot 'bout how being on tour is home. An’, don’t get me wrong - I am dead grateful. But, I don’t know… I just love you more than all that. You’re home, you know what I mean? I love you. Please don’t stab yaself again, ya hear? Stressin’ me the fuck out.”

Van kissed you so softly that at first you weren’t sure it was happening. He always kissed you like that first thing in the morning, and when you were drunk or stoned. It was his way of checking how in the moment you were. He’d wait for you to tilt your head up and kiss back. You were about to too, when a clattering of sound drew Van’s attention away from you.

“None of that in 'ere, thank you very much,” Debbie said. She looked over at the cups of tea she’d put on the cabinet.

“Ya ruining my big moment!” Van laughed, standing up and slinging his arm around her.

“Somethin’ tells me you’re the type of lad to have a lot of big moments, huh? Sure you’ll get another chance.”

You watched as they laughed together. “Don’t forget meeeee,” you whined, reaching out for Van and scrunching his shirt up in your fist.

“Oh, she’s the jealous type,” Debbie noted, eyebrow raised, walking away.

“Been through this, baby. Could never forget ya. Come 'ere,” Van said, shaking his head and leaning back in. Quickly, he slid his hand to cradle your head. He kissed you deeply and with an apology for being left off the list and a thank you for existing and an I’m sorry you stabbed yourself with my guitarist’s Swiss army knife and an I fucking love you more than life itself. “Okay? Yeah?”

“Yeah,” you whispered in reply.

“Yeah. Okay. Now, here. Drink this tea. I’m scared of what that nurse’ll do to us if we don’t drink it,” Van said, handing you a china mug of tea. “Just don’t drop-” But it was too late. Your one free hand hadn’t come around to reality just yet. Maybe it was just your innate clumsiness. However it happened, it happened. The mug shattered on the hospital floor, spilling tea everywhere. You looked up at Van and did the only thing your morphine-run brain could think to do. You laughed. “God, I love you. But, ah, you’re taking the blame for this one, baby.”


End file.
